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| Immigrant entrepreneur: | Christian Carreon |
| Company: | AllOneWealth |
| Place of birth: | Mexico |
| Employees: | 2 |
| Age started business: | 27 |
Show notes
Christian came to the United States when he was 7 years old with his family after losing his sister. His mom was able to regain momentum and strength to launch her own company and they started a new life in California.
Life was not always great for Christian. After struggling with constant racism, seeing his parents go through a bankruptcy, he ended up in the hospital fighting for his life. He eventually lost both of his kidneys, but not too long after ended up locked up in jail looking over his life.
After all of what he went through, he managed to get a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and create a wealth management firm at the age of 27.
Three years later, he’s still running the successful wealth management firm as a young entrepreneur.
Quotes by Christian
Having seen my parents struggle so much, they filed for bankruptcy, and literally they had no money and I didn’t want to live through that again.
Trading taught me to manage money in a different manner.
I consider a consistent check as riskier than starting your own business.
Regardless of what you look like, I think you can come here and within a short period of time, you can make a tremendous quantum leap and really create any type of life that you want.
I want to say that I faced a lot of racism and I faced a lot of judgement, but ultimately that was an internal belief.
If you devote your focus, your time, your life into doing the work necessary, I think the world is yours. And that’s possible here (America).
Commit, and do it.
If you can take the risk, do it.
There is so much opportunity here for you to not take any risk at all.
Where to find Christian
AllOneWealth | LinkedIn | Instagram
Links mentioned
[read more] Alina Warrick (1s):
Welcome to the Immigrant Entrepreneurs Podcast, Episode 34.
Christian Carreon (6s):
I ended up in jail on my 18th birthday, and during my time there I really realized that after talking to a lot of people in there, I realized that that life was not for me. You know, what you hear in life about you know, you’re either going to ended up in jail or you’re either going to end up dead or in the hospital, ended up being true for me. I had already ended up in the hospital for my health but I ended up in jail and I had friends who were dying either from overdose or from killings.
Alina Warrick (34s):
My name is Alina Warrick and I’m extremely honored to speak with Christian Carreon on this episode. Christian went through quite a journey that was both life changing for him and transformational. He not only saw his own sister die, but went through constant racism living in America, was incarcerated for a period of time, but also lost both of his kidneys, which ended up firing up that entrepreneurial spirit on the inside. He started his wealth management firm at the age of 27.
Alina Warrick (1m 14s):
And three years later, he’s a successful young entrepreneur. So let’s dive right in and hear all about his journey. Right, Christian, thank you so much for coming to the Immigrant Entrepreneurs podcast. Welcome to the show.
Christian Carreon (1m 31s):
Thank you for having me.
Alina Warrick (1m 32s):
Yeah. I’m super excited to hear all about your journey and you know, I read about you in the book Immigrant Hustles. So let’s dive right in because it’s one of a kind and I’m really, really excited. So lets talk about your immigrant journey. Tell us where you’re from and when did you come to the United States?
Christian Carreon (1m 52s):
Yeah, so I am from Guadalajara, Mexico, and we came in 1997.
Alina Warrick (1m 59s):
Okay. So how old were you?
Christian Carreon (2m 1s):
I was seven.
Alina Warrick (2m 2s):
Okay. So you came in with your family?
Christian Carreon (2m 4s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (2m 5s):
And why did your family wanted to immigrate to the United States?
Christian Carreon (2m 9s):
A series of events happened when I grew up, I had a younger sister around the age of, two to three. So this was around ’90 to ’93. Her kidney started to fail. And so for the two to three years that followed our life was pretty much, or what I remember is week after week, appointments to doctor’s, appointments with dialysis, she was on dialysis three times a week and just hospital visits back to back, week by week. And unfortunately two years of that life were too much for her and she ended up passing away in 1996.
Alina Warrick (2m 46s):
Oh now I’m sorry for that.
Christian Carreon (2m 48s):
No worries. And I think that was around the end of 1996 and throughout that journey, my mom, Mexico is very loose with their loss, and so my mom found herself in a position where she was handing over the hospital money in order to move my sister up in the transplant list, this was in the ’90s, right? So I can imagine that now Mexico might be different, but in those days it was very, hardly any rules applied. And so she felt betrayed that, I remember her specifically telling me that she employed a lot of people from the city and she had a pre, it’s a big company back then.
Christian Carreon (3m 33s):
And she just said, you know, I employee a lot of people from the city. I gave the hospital money in order to move your sister up. And that never happened. So she felt betrayed by that. She felt betrayed by Mexico that how she was so involved with the community outreach that she did. And.
Alina Warrick (3m 49s):
So she felt scammed?
Christian Carreon (3m 51s):
Yes, she did. She pretty much put her life on hold to help my sister out. And she fell into depression shortly after. And she sort of, they don’t want to do with anything with money anymore, she wanted no relationship with it. So she decided to leave Mexico. She told my, she brought it up to my dad and me, ultimately that she wanted us to move to the United States and leave Mexico behind. So we did that. She didn’t sell the business. She did not sell her house. She gave everything away. She gave her business to her employees and pretty much all her belongings she gave them away to her family, her parents. And we came here with just whatever we had in our briefcase.
Christian Carreon (4m 31s):
And I think it was around $5,000. And that’s where our journey started here in ’97.
Alina Warrick (4m 38s):
And what kind of business did she have?
Christian Carreon (4m 40s):
She owned, it was a small retail store. I want to say, how can I compare it to probably your typical retail store that you see on the corner. Something smaller than Sears or Macy.
Alina Warrick (4m 52s):
Yeah, so she basically decide to come to the United States for a fresh start.
Christian Carreon (4m 56s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (4m 57s):
Got it. And what about your dad?
Christian Carreon (4m 58s):
He had a business in Mexico as well. It was a very small, like a handyman to help out people with car issues, anything that they need help with, pretty much. And he ended up coming here. We came here first, my mom and I. And I think he came five months later just to make sure, you know, all the business that needed to be taken care of in Mexico, happen. And he came over here and we originally moved to Oxnard, California, which is, you know, an hour and a half North of LA.
Alina Warrick (5m 29s):
So what was it like growing up in Mexico? What are some memories that you remember since you were really, still really young? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Christian Carreon (5m 38s):
I don’t know if my mind blocks a lot of things from the pain of what we went through, but I don’t remember much. I remember a lot of doctor visits. I remember a lot of dialysis appointments. I remember one or two birthdays. Other than that, I don’t remember much. I think, you know, like I said, I was really affected by what happened and I mean, I literally saw my sister passed away in front of me and I think that was a big shock into my childhood. And I think somehow my mind decided it was probably best to block those years from me.
Alina Warrick (6m 17s):
Wow. That’s so, so tough. And I can’t imagine losing a sibling and especially right in front of you and going through all those struggles, you feel like you are there with her when she’s going through that pain. Wow. I can’t imagine that pain. So I’m sorry that you went through that.
Christian Carreon (6m 33s):
Thank you, no worries.
Alina Warrick (6m 35s):
So tell me a little bit about the struggles that you had to go through when you first immigrated to California?
Christian Carreon (6m 42s):
We moved to Oxnard, like I said, since we had no money, we stayed in a very, very small one car garage. We made that garage into a living room.
Alina Warrick (6m 52s):
You guys lived in a garage.
Christian Carreon (6m 54s):
Yes. So I don’t know if other immigrants have similar stories, but when we came here, we didn’t obviously have no money, so we couldn’t rent anywhere. And we had my brother sister’s family, had a house that they let us live with them. But since they had no room, they turned the garage into a bedroom.
Alina Warrick (7m 17s):
Got it, got it. Okay.
Christian Carreon (7m 18s):
So, you know, but it was extremely small, like just one car could fit in there. So it was literally the bed that was there for us. And then a, they made some sort of closet for us.
Alina Warrick (7m 29s):
And this was for a family of three?
Christian Carreon (7m 31s):
Yes. And we’ve lived there for, I think three years. My parents picked up any kind of jobs they could in order to save some money. I started going to elementary school. I think I started in third grade here. It was very tough. We lived on food stamps during those times. Now, you know, I was called Fez, you know, like the guy from the ’70s shows because my English was not well, I was in a lot of an ESL classes, and so I was sort of picked on due to my lack of English. And that was my life, you know, one thing I really remember from that part of my childhood was when, I don’t know if it was disgust that people would, you know, they would give us this look of disgust where you would shop with food stamps, but it felt like it was, you know, I felt like because I was being judged a lot in school, I sort of developed that paradigm.
Christian Carreon (8m 22s):
And that was my perspective with everything. I felt like I faced a lot of racism to that. And I felt some sort of way when people would look at us and find us holding them up in the line in order to pay with the food stamps. Right? So I felt embarrassed. I felt sad for what was happening from this childhood I had in Mexico, too, how we were living now. And that was my life for those three years. Eventually my parents saved up a little bit of money and we moved to Canoga Park, which is a little bit closer to Los Angeles and everything starts to get better. My parents had started saving money, my mom started, opened up her own hair salon and everything was picking back up.
Christian Carreon (9m 4s):
I got into high school. I wanted to play baseball for the high school team. So I applied and they told me, you know, Hey, go through your physical, you are healthy and you were able to do everything. And so I went to school and get my physical done. And I think it was February 14th. I think I remember the date February 14th, 2006. And the doctor came in after getting my blood work done, really shocked saying that your son needs to go to the hospital right now.
Alina Warrick (9m 34s):
Oh my goodness.
Christian Carreon (9m 35s):
Yeah. And he said, well, his GFR, which measures the kidneys health was at 13. Mind you the, sorry, not the GFR, the creatinine, creatinine measures the, I guess the health of the kidney, this level was supposed to be between .07 to 1.3 in your body. So if you’re within that range, you have healthy kidneys. My level was at 13, which was a stage five kidney failure, which means that the kidney function was under 15%, but I felt fine. Right? I felt no symptoms. It was really a weird situation, because they say, well, you shouldn’t be able to walk right now. Your kidneys are literally about to give out any second now.
Alina Warrick (10m 19s):
Oh my goodness.
Christian Carreon (10m 20s):
Yes. So they rushed me to the hospital. And that was my first memory of starting a life of hospital visits again. Everything that I went through with my sister, I relived it in my teenage years. Immediately, I went into dialysis because my kidneys weren’t working. I was considered the sick kid in school. I had to step out of high school for the junior year because that would just, my life became an exact replica of hers. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I was in dialysis. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was in doctor appointments. Or during that time, my parents had a little bit more awareness on the different types of possible remedies from Eastern to Western medicine.
Christian Carreon (11m 4s):
And so at that time, my parents had a little bit of money saved, which was going to be the down payment for a home. And so they decided to use that money to try everything. So I went to every single kind of doctor from Eastern to Western, all up and down California. I think, I want to say, down to San Diego and up to Santa Barbara. We tried anywhere we could, anywhere we got, you know, referrals. We went and we did the best we could. And unfortunately, not being worked, it was too late. The kidney function could not be increased.
Alina Warrick (11m 44s):
And so how old were you when you discovered this?
Christian Carreon (11m 46s):
16.
Alina Warrick (11m 47s):
16 years old. Okay.
Christian Carreon (11m 49s):
Yeah, so pretty much 10 years after what had happened with my sister and that was my life. You know, my mom, I remember specifically that my mom had this freedom. Well, mind you this was, all this started happening in 2006 and led up to 2008 when the economy took a hit. And during that time, like I said, my mom had a business, she owned a hair salon, but the same freedom that she had in order to step outside of her business to take care of me and take me to appointments was the same freedom that costs her losing her business because she wasn’t there to cater to her clients, to make sure she was also there for her employees. Her business started to go down.
Alina Warrick (12m 31s):
And so she opened a business in America.
Christian Carreon (12m 33s):
She did.
Alina Warrick (12m 34s):
Okay.
Christian Carreon (12m 35s):
She came here and she, you know, she got licensed to be an aesthetician and she ended up opening that when I entered high school. It was successful, it was doing well, but because she had to pretty much spent a full eight hour shift. If we had to be at, where we go to UCLA for dialysis. And you can just think about the traffic that’s in LA. And it would take us to, you know, an hour and a half, two hours just to get to UCLA from where we were, spent six hours there in dialysis, doctor appointments, and then another two hours to drive back home. By the time that it was finished, it was a pretty much her whole work day.
Alina Warrick (13m 8s):
So did you have to get out of school?
Christian Carreon (13m 10s):
I did. I was not in school for my junior year. I did a little bit of homeschooling. It was tough because I just, I had no schedule outside of.
Alina Warrick (13m 20s):
Doctor’s visits?
Christian Carreon (13m 21s):
Yeah, dialysis. It was literally, I asked my self a lot of time what did I need to learn from this? Because I was reliving everything that my sister went through, literally everything. And so that was my life through my high school. Eventually my mom ended up being a match. And thankfully with the system here in America, we were able to go through the transplant process, extremely fast, I think within four or five months after I started dialysis they, we were almost pretty much ready to go with the transplant surgery. And so I think it was in 2007 that we did the transplant and everything went fine. I was able to get a kidney from her and life started to get better.
Christian Carreon (14m 3s):
And, you know, again, I was like a, you know, fall down twice, get yourself up for the third time.
Alina Warrick (14m 8s):
So this was two years, going through all of that dialysis, doctors visits, and then your mom was able to be a donor for the kidney?
Christian Carreon (14m 17s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (14m 18s):
Got it. And so after that, were you like a hundred percent healed or what was the recovery process?
Christian Carreon (14m 25s):
I was. I spent two months in bedrest. I really couldn’t move, but other than that to a certain standard grade, like I wasn’t a hundred percent healed. There is still a, you’re typically, after you go through an organ transplant, you need to take anti-rejection medicine in order for your body to not reject to the organ because it’s still not yours. So your immune system tends to attack it. So I have to take and I’ve been taking immunosuppressants, specific medicine to bring down my immune system so it doesn’t have the strength to attack the organ.
Alina Warrick (15m 2s):
Wow, your mom must be so proud to be able to save your life.
Christian Carreon (15m 7s):
She is. I mean, you know, it was really tough to go through that again. And to think that she would possibly lose her second child. They ended up having another son, which was my younger brother, but I mean to go through that process again, but this time to actually be able to give a kidney, it was really beautiful.
Alina Warrick (15m 27s):
So I wanted to go back to a certain snippet that you mentioned in the book about racism. And you mentioned something about minor violations and how you guys were treated. Tell me more about that. And how did you feel, and did you ever want to just leave the United States and go back to Mexico after being treated like that?
Christian Carreon (15m 49s):
Well, I faced it a lot. I don’t have an awareness of a lot of things, so I would wear hats. Just, everybody wears hats because I was Hispanic and I looked at a certain way. During that time we get pulled over a lot and they immediately would take me out and putting in handcuffs and ask me what gang I was affiliated with.
Alina Warrick (16m 9s):
Oh my goodness.
Christian Carreon (16m 10s):
Because, you know, let’s say I was wearing a New York Yankees hat. There’s a gang nearby where I live, that those letters apparently represented the same gang letters. And because I was Hispanic, they were pulling me over. And immediately I’ll get put in handcuffs and asked that same question and it would happen, you know, whether I was with my parents or not. So to answer your question, I didn’t feel like I wanted to move back to Mexico. What I did feel is, was a, I felt sort of bad for being Hispanic. I felt maybe bad not the right word, but I felt like because of all the judgment that I went through, all the, having elementary and middle school people call me Fez really affected my confidence because I didn’t speak English really well until high school.
Christian Carreon (17m 3s):
And so that sort of created this outlook for me, as far as how I resembled myself or how I represented myself as being Hispanic. During high school, I went to a pretty predominantly white high school. And so I gravitated towards that. For some reason I wanted to be in certain kind of groups. So I could not be put together with this group of Hispanic people and be considered that part of whatever that group activity was up to. And so that was because I was also depressed back then, and I was thinking differently and thought that if I gravitate towards the white culture more, I would be accepted.
Christian Carreon (17m 47s):
I will no longer have that nickname. Mind you, this was in high school and I no longer had that nickname. But, you know, as you can tell from everything that I went through in childhood, it sort of carried with me up to high school and I felt a certain way.
Alina Warrick (18m 0s):
Yeah. So your self confidence was always just beaten down by all these different things that you were experiencing from your childhood to ESL classes, to being called Fez and then racism through the law enforcement.
Christian Carreon (18m 16s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (18m 17s):
Wow. So before you tell our listeners about your company. Tell me more about the path that you took, did you try to go into any other fields before starting your business?
Christian Carreon (18m 28s):
I did. I think this goes back to college, maybe it’s in college. Well, I should say that right after high school, 2008 happened and it sort of crippled our family even more. My, my mom ended up losing her business. My dad lost his job and obviously we had no, no money, and so it really affected us. The emotional decisions that came out of not having a financial plan really did not benefit us at all. My mom developed a gambling addiction. My dad had a drinking addiction and I finding, being depressed and needed to find some sort of support group outside of that. I joined, I have a lot of cousins here, where I had a lot of cousins who were in gangs and I gravitated towards that after high school.
Christian Carreon (19m 12s):
And so I ended up in jail on my 18th birthday. And during my time there, I really realized that after talking to a lot of people in there, I realized that that life was not for me. You know, what you hear in life about, you know, you’re either gonna end up in jail or you’re either going to end up dead or in the hospital, ended up being true for me. I had already ended up in the hospital for my health. I ended up in jail and I had friends who were dying either from overdose or from killings.
Alina Warrick (19m 40s):
Wow. So did you say that you joined a gang?
Christian Carreon (19m 43s):
No, no, I didn’t join it, but I grew up in that, that was my environment. During those years, I would hang out with my cousins and my cousins were in a gang. So I was in that world. And so, I didn’t spend a lot of time in jail, I think it was two weeks. But during that time I realized that, that I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want that to be my future. I felt that if I had a second chance in life, there was no way that I was going to let this, second chance go to waste. And so after that, my mom, you know, through the help of my mom. She said, well, you know, you need to go to college. And so for some reason they accepted me. And during college, I realized that I wanted to make, with the classes that I was taking and the education that I was getting, I realized that I wanted to create some sort of residual income because during the times that what happened to my sister, and what happened with myself age 16 to 19, I realized that I was not employable.
Christian Carreon (20m 39s):
Companies could not keep me on because I had to miss a lot of work or I had to miss a lot of school. And so I thought, okay, so in 20 years from now, in 30 years from now. If I need to go through another transplant again, and what will I do if there’s no income coming in. Mind you, my perspective back then didn’t have the understanding of health insurance, or paid time off, retirement assets, et cetera. So I just thought, okay, well, if I’m not at work, then I won’t have an income coming in. And so during that time, I made the decision to find a way to create a residual income for the future.
Alina Warrick (21m 13s):
So I got to ask, what did you study in college?
Christian Carreon (21m 16s):
Finance.
Alina Warrick (21m 17s):
Finance, okay.
Christian Carreon (21m 18s):
I started teaching myself how to trade stocks when I was 20. I saw that as a possible way to create a residual income in the future. And so I started to teach myself.
Alina Warrick (21m 27s):
And where did you get that idea? Did you have some friends that were already generating some nice income, or where did you find that stock business and start doing it and learning investments?
Christian Carreon (21m 39s):
In college, and I had nobody and nobody that I knew was in that at all. I was in a completely different world.
Alina Warrick (21m 46s):
So you were a really good student in those Finance classes.
Christian Carreon (21m 50s):
Yeah. I gravitated. You know, I was really bad in school. I had a really low GPA in high school. I was absent most of the time, but once I realized that I had to create something for myself in the future, in order to not go, you know, this is outside and this is what happens. I’ll share a little bit more this in our call in a bit, but when we have no income or we’re in a situation where we go through a life event, whether you know, it’s losing a sibling, a parent, a partner, and your income is affected whether your saving is, or your current cashflow, the decisions you make are emotional. And that decision tends to affect people tenfold.
Christian Carreon (22m 33s):
I mean, you know, the decisions that we took, like the decisions that my parents took during that time led into depression, led into an alcohol addiction, led into a gambling addiction for my mother because we had no foundation. Right? So everything went away. We had no money on top of going through everything that we went through. So that was my pain. My pain was living through ’08 having seen my parents struggle so much, they filed for bankruptcy. And literally we had no money and I did not want to live through that again. I knew from the conversations that we had with doctors that, Hey, this is a good probability that later in life, your kidneys will start to fail because your immune system, it’s just, will never stop trying to attack the kidney.
Christian Carreon (23m 19s):
And so I said, okay, well, there is a good chance that I am going to live through this again. So what can I do now? So in, you know, like you said, 10, 20 years from now, we don’t go through that.
Alina Warrick (23m 30s):
To bulletproof yourself.
Christian Carreon (23m 32s):
Right. Whether if I have a family of my own or with my parents. And so that’s when I started teaching myself how to trade stocks, I didn’t joined a fraternity in college. I didn’t go out partying. I worked at a bar during college and I would get off, you know, at two, three in the morning. And I’d wake up by 5:30 in the morning in order to teach myself how to trade. I didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up losing $15,000 my first year. Thankfully, the bar I worked `at provided good income and so, and I also lived with my parents back then. So it affected me, but not as much as someone can imagine.
Alina Warrick (24m 7s):
How are you teaching yourself? This is outside of college or just through college textbooks.
Christian Carreon (24m 12s):
Outside, you don’t learn this, you don’t learn stock trading in Finance.
Alina Warrick (24m 15s):
In Finance. Yeah.
Christian Carreon (24m 17s):
It’s mostly corporate finance, right. Not how to day trade.
Alina Warrick (24m 21s):
Yeah. And did you take like online courses or just pick up books from Barnes and Nobles? What’d you do?
Christian Carreon (24m 27s):
Yeah. Pick up books. No courses, I picked up books. I watched a lot of YouTube and YouTube was my mentor back then. And so, you know, little by little, I started, I just kept trading. The first year I lost 15,000. The second year, I think I lost like 5,000. That third year, I broke even. And then the fourth year, I started making some money. You know during that journey. Everyone kept telling me, well, do something else with your life. And my parents were always wondering why I was doing that, why I was not focusing in college in order to try and get an internship, were trying to get a better job out of college. And for some reason I was just focused on this. They didn’t understand, but they also did not understand, a lot of friends they didn’t understand the pain that I went through in 2008 with my family.
Christian Carreon (25m 11s):
And I think that was the main driver in keeping me focused. And so on the fifth year I made money.
Alina Warrick (25m 18s):
And this out of college already right?
Christian Carreon (25m 21s):
No, I did five years in college.
Alina Warrick (25m 22s):
Oh okay.
Christian Carreon (25m 23s):
Yeah. So I’m in the fifth year when I graduated, I had made enough money to move out, move back into my parents’. So I moved into my parents to help them out. So I stayed with them for a year after college. And I paid their bills as a thank you for helping me. I thought I had my life figured out back then. I said, I’m just going to trade for the rest of my life and I’ll generate an income from that. And so going to your question of what I did after, prior to the business that I had. Shortly after leaving college and just trading, I realized that I didn’t love it enough to do that for the rest of my own life. And I wanted to help people with their health. And so I started working with a company called Medtronic, which engineers the insulin pumps for people with diabetes.
Alina Warrick (26m 5s):
So you went and got yourself a job.
Christian Carreon (26m 8s):
I did.
Alina Warrick (26m 8s):
Yeah.
Christian Carreon (26m 10s):
I mean, I still traded. You know, we’d wake up really early and right before I would go to work, I would trade.
Alina Warrick (26m 15s):
Got it.
Christian Carreon (26m 15s):
And so I work in their Sales department and I spoke to, I think I lasted for a year there. I got the opportunity to speak with patients all around the US and I thought that I wanted to help people with their health. Right. I want to see what I could do in order to help people with their health because if their health is taken care of then they can have a happy life, manageable, right, but happy. And during my time there, I realized that there was a bigger underlying problem. I realized that regardless of the income, if you still went through a life event, which they did due to their health, that they would be unprepared for what led, for the life that happened after that life event.
Christian Carreon (26m 58s):
A lot of patients that I talked to, they ended up selling their home. So they’re moving back to their siblings or parents because just their credit card debt, and all this other debt that kept increasing while they got sick, because some of them, they couldn’t work anymore. They had no income to maintain their living expenses on top of their health and their credit cards that they kept piling up. And so I realized that this is exactly the same thing that my family went through. And not that it was strictly an income problem, right. I thought that if you were making under six figures a year, then you’re a more likely to go to this sort of situations. And while that is true, there’s still a large portion of America that due to a lack of financial literacy, we don’t really prepare for a life event.
Christian Carreon (27m 46s):
And so I said, okay, well, I want to change and pivot from what I’m doing and get into helping people create a financial plan. Because if at that point, I realized that if you make sure you fill up all your buckets with a financial plan, then if you go through a life event, you no longer have to worry about money because you took care of all the things that you needed to take care of before that life event happened. And that is the journey that got me into what I am currently doing.
Alina Warrick (28m 16s):
Okay. So you said you were in that very first company for one year. So you lasted there for one year. And so after that, did you open up your own business or did you go somewhere else?
Christian Carreon (28m 28s):
Well, after I left Medronic. I joined a financial planning firm and I left in a year after that, I had, you know, I always get lunch with a buddy of mine from college. And he was a financial advisor and he always shared that he wanted to have his own business, this and that. And throughout the time we both agreed that, Hey, I’m going to make the jump. He would tell me and I’d say, okay, I’ll leave as well and join you. And I think that was in August, 2017, that he left. And then I left in October of 2017 to create what we have now.
Alina Warrick (29m 2s):
Okay. So, and then that’s when you guys created All One Wealth?
Christian Carreon (29m 6s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (29m 7s):
Okay. And so how old were you?
Christian Carreon (29m 9s):
27.
Alina Warrick (29m 10s):
27 years old. Okay. So you and your partner decided to branch out from the financial industry that he was in and create this company?
Christian Carreon (29m 20s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (29m 21s):
Okay. So tell me a little bit more about All One Wealth and what you guys do.
Christian Carreon (29m 26s):
Yeah. So All One Wealth is a socially responsible wealth management firm. So we help people invest for retirement, college or to leave a legacy. But we do it in social responsible companies. We believe that money is energy and that we transmit that energy from companies that are extracting value, like Exon, to companies that are creating value and making an impact in the world, then you create a consciousness shift because you’re moving, you’re allocating the energy towards what’s creating a bigger impact. And therefore that will also increase the returns of your investments, because, you know, you have higher employee retention rate. You have companies that are generating higher revenues because of what they’re doing.
Christian Carreon (30m 10s):
And they are actually helping the world moving to a better area and a higher level of consciousness in a way. And so we believe that you obviously get a high return and through our research and how we’ve managed the portfolios throughout the last three years, it’s done just that.
Alina Warrick (30m 30s):
Okay. So and who are your major clients? Are these companies, are these individual people? Who do you guys mainly serve?
Christian Carreon (30m 37s):
Individual investors.
Alina Warrick (30m 38s):
Okay. Got it.
Christian Carreon (30m 40s):
And so are you guys an investment firm or do you guys manage 401ks and stocks and bonds? Wealth management overall? Yes.
Alina Warrick (30m 48s):
Okay.
Christian Carreon (30m 49s):
Wealth management, we do manage some 401ks, but it’s mostly individual investors.
Alina Warrick (30m 56s):
Okay. Got it. And so mainly through stocks and bonds or anything else.
Christian Carreon (31m 1s):
Yes. Stocks and bonds, ETF’s but pretty much that you can
Alina Warrick (31m 6s):
Okay. So do you guys have a minimum investment for someone like a new client that wants to come in and start their portfolio?
Christian Carreon (31m 14s):
Right now it’s 250,000, but we are working on creating a automated robot. So it’s an automated, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Betterment or WealthFront. So they are an automated adviser, which is pretty much means that if you want to bypass the human aspect of investment management, you go to these companies and you input your information, you answer, you know, the questions so they can understand your investment profile and who you are as an investor, and they create a portfolio to meet those objectives. And so we’re in the middle of creating something like that, but a social responsible one. So that way, anybody from any background on your own, from any type of investment portfolio can also do the same with pretty much a very, very small minimum.
Alina Warrick (32m 5s):
Got it. So that’s actually talking to a live robot or through AI software.
Christian Carreon (32m 10s):
AI software.
Alina Warrick (32m 11s):
Okay. Okay. Got it. That would be really cool to talk to a robot.
Christian Carreon (32m 14s):
It would be. I think at the future.
Alina Warrick (32m 18s):
So, okay. I got to ask you something then, if someone does not have $250,000 to come and get some awesome advice, where do you think they can start from? Like on their own.
Christian Carreon (32m 30s):
I think there’s a lot of websites out there that can help. I mean, I won’t turn somebody away as far as like, Hey, we can have a 30 minute hour call to try and guide you towards the best place. So I don’t mind being that point of reference in guiding them somewhere, wherever they need to go. But Google, you know, YouTube is a good source. Betterment or WealthFront, is also a very good, which are the only two main auto advisors.
Alina Warrick (32m 60s):
And so any financial books that you would recommend them reading picking up?
Christian Carreon (33m 3s):
Good question. I’m on the library, behind me.
Alina Warrick (33m 8s):
Yeah. I know I’ve heard The Millionaire Mind several times on the show. I’ve heard Millionaire Next Door.
Christian Carreon (33m 16s):
Yes. That’s a good book. You know, one comes to mind, but I can’t remember the name of it.
Alina Warrick (33m 21s):
Rich Man In Babylon?
Christian Carreon (33m 24s):
That’s a good book.
Alina Warrick (33m 25s):
Yeah.
Christian Carreon (33m 25s):
I think it’s fine. It’s called, I Will Teach You How To Be Rich. I can’t remember the author. I think it’s an amazing book for somebody who is getting started. I mean, it goes over through every single aspect of your life, whether it’s, you know, how to manage your credit cards, how to start investment portfolio? How to consider your first home purchase? It goes over a lot. I think that’s a great source. And it’s called, once again, I Will Teach You How To Be Rich. I can’t remember the author, but it’s an amazing book.
Alina Warrick (33m 54s):
Got it. Okay. I will find that and link it into our show notes. So anyone can pick up that book on Amazon or Audible, wherever they’re listening.
Christian Carreon (34m 1s):
Of course.
Alina Warrick (34m 2s):
Okay. Awesome. Great. Thanks a lot for all of that advice and for all that knowledge that you just shared with us. So how long did it take your businesses to start seeing some real traction in the beginning stages. And I know in the book, you mentioned that the very first month you made like $6.
Christian Carreon (34m 18s):
Yeah. So the way that we chose to collect our fee is a management fee, which is a, an annual management fee versus a commission-based model.
Alina Warrick (34m 31s):
Okay.
Christian Carreon (34m 31s):
So we feel like it’s more of a fiduciary, to work with somebody and have our fee be tied to the performance of their portfolio versus, you know, taking a five or 10% commission on whatever investment size they have. I think that’s a very outdated model and it no longer works. And so, right. So when we started, my friends were the first ones to become my clients. And so being that they had small portfolio sizes, the income tended to be very small. And so the first month my income was $6.
Alina Warrick (35m 7s):
Did you have to split that $6 with your partner?
Christian Carreon (35m 10s):
That was my split.
Alina Warrick (35m 13s):
Okay.
Christian Carreon (35m 14s):
But yeah, it was very small. And, you know, luckily he had, what helped us is that he had a book already from the previous wealth managing firm that he had, and I brought over through a out time. I had brought over my book that I had from a financial planning firm and pretty much savings, savings is what helped us out a lot.
Alina Warrick (35m 35s):
Okay. So did you guys have to raise any capital to start your business?
Christian Carreon (35m 39s):
Yes. My business partner, was in a place where he could take out some money from his property. And so we did, we took out, I think it was about 50,000. And in order to help us create the structure of the RAA and get started.
Alina Warrick (35m 57s):
Got it. Got it. Okay. So going back to that previous question, how long did it take you guys to see some real traction? So the first month was $6 and I’m hoping it went up after that?
Christian Carreon (36m 7s):
Yeah. I want to say around six months, I mean, throughout the first six months we onboarded all the previous clients and after six months we started to see some reasonable income and we just kept growing it.
Alina Warrick (36m 21s):
And then did you do marketing or a lot of Facebook ads or any kind of advertisement?
Christian Carreon (36m 27s):
No. The SEC is a little bit weird about us marketing. So what we did is we pretty much just did a lot of networking. We partnered up with a lot of conscious companies and here in the West coast. And so we are a part of actually a lot of nonprofits that work together to connect a lot of conscious companies. And throughout those networks, we started working together with new clients.
Alina Warrick (36m 54s):
And what does conscious companies mean?
Christian Carreon (36m 57s):
I think it’s when they put impact on top of not, maybe not on top, but with profits, you know, a lot of companies tend to choose profits and greed and therefore they tend to skip out and not of ethical and governance issues. You know, which is one of the things that we look at, our investment criteria is not sure if you’ve heard of it, but we filtered companies to go to ESG standard and that’s the environmental, social and governance. So if companies don’t meet a certain environmental standard of social standard or governance standard, then they don’t fit into our investment criteria. So we don’t want companies who are just out there trying to.
Alina Warrick (37m 40s):
Destroy the world.
Christian Carreon (37m 42s):
Yeah. And we want companies that are actually doing something while helping the world become better or their infrastructure is focused on a high governance standard. Is there a good relationship between the corporate entity and the shareholders? Right. You know, how does that recycling of toxic materials look like for these companies in the cities? There’s a lot of the things that we consider and I think that’s what makes a company conscious that they also consider these things that they also want to make sure that not only within their company, but in the community that they’re in, in the world, in the industry that there in and they are also contributing something else other than just extracting profits.
Alina Warrick (38m 26s):
That’s an amazing business model to have, to be able to impact the world on the back end, by promoting all these ecofriendly and conscious companies, that’s awesome. I love it.
Christian Carreon (38m 37s):
Thank you.
Alina Warrick (38m 38s):
Yeah. So Christian, did you have any mentors that helped you out to start your business?
Christian Carreon (38m 44s):
I would say my business partner. He’s a little bit older than me and he has, after college, he was in, he was in wealth management already. So he has, I think, seven years of prior experience to when him and I got together. So I would definitely consider him as a mentor when we got started. Other than that, we really didn’t have anybody else, I think we sort of took the, we sort of got started into starting my own thing at a very young age. Typically in this industry, you sort of branch out after you’ve done some time with a big company and we sort of took a back door on this. So we were just learning as we went.
Alina Warrick (39m 23s):
So I’m hearing a little bit that you guys didn’t really have a business plan. So you guys just went all in and got your client’s from other places and started to see some business growth and went from there.
Christian Carreon (39m 38s):
Yeah, pretty much.
Alina Warrick (39m 39s):
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So what do you think most prepared you to become an entrepreneur? Is there anything that you can specifically see that prepared you in any way?
Christian Carreon (39m 51s):
I think my mom is a big impact on that. She was definitely an entrepreneur from Mexico. The life that we had in Mexico and to choosing to pivot here, you know, immediately after working on a couple of years and she saved up money, she opened up a business of her own. And prior to me getting sick in high school, I spent a lot of the time after school at her hair salon. And now we’ll learn a lot of how to run a business. And so I think I learned a lot from her. So I think that was a big impact from myself and also trading, trading taught me how to manage money in a different manner and how to take responsibility for the wins and losses of the business cycle.
Christian Carreon (40m 35s):
And it really showed me how to manage risks in a different way, how to calculate risks in a different way. And I think that allowed me to look at the risk of having no consistent income, much differently than somebody who is looking at that and comparing that to a paycheck, right, and a consistent income. Before I went into the, I started out my own business, I considered a consistent check as riskier than starting your own business. Because as an employee, a hundred percent of the risk of your income is based on one person or one group deciding, right?
Christian Carreon (41m 15s):
A lot of friends, unfortunately what happened last year with COVID, we saw that. We saw what happens when you have all your eggs in one basket and you are an employee of a company and they have to close down due to cost outside of their control. But unfortunately they had to close down or they had to let a lot of employees go. I considered that a bigger risk than diversifying that risk with as many clients as you can possibly manage. If one client left, you still have 99 clients there who are helping you have an income. And I think a lot of what I learn, I learned that mostly through my trading and that the type of risks that I had learn how to make in the market.
Christian Carreon (42m 0s):
And I transitioned that over into owning a business.
Alina Warrick (42m 4s):
That is so powerful, the way that you can say it’s so much more riskier to be an employee then to being an entrepreneur and having that hold your future and having that define your destiny. Whereas if you’re an employee, you can be let go any time. That’s so powerful. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah. So looking back three years ago, when you first started with your partner, what are some struggles that you’ve had to go through in the beginning stages? Because you said that, did you guys, did you quit your job?
Alina Warrick (42m 46s):
You had a steady paycheck and now you’re down to zero.
Christian Carreon (42m 49s):
Yeah, I think the biggest struggle was, I mean, myself, right? The, in this specific, I think my struggles are specific to the industry that I’m in. I faced a lot of struggles in welcoming in new clients. I would often be in situations where the conversations with new possible clients would be well, how do you have the experience to manage my retirement assets when your 28, 27 years old? Completely understandable.
Alina Warrick (43m 18s):
Yeah.
Christian Carreon (43m 19s):
And I faced that and I think that was my biggest struggle in trying to grow the business for my myself, understandably, not all the people wanting me to manage their retirement assets. Yeah. So I think that was the biggest one. I mean, I worked and I pivoted into learning and you know, I did a mentorship. I did a year long mentorship where the hedge fund in Australia where they taught me how to code, how to program. And so I programmed strategies that I now use. And through that, I’m able to have a better conversations with potential clients because now instead of them looking at my age and thinking, how can you manage my retirement assets?
Christian Carreon (44m 0s):
Now I have the data and have years of research that I can show them. Well, I actually, you know, created these type of investment models and what’s actually managing the portfolio are the models, not me. And I think that gives them a sense of relief being that the models that the algorithms are, what’s managing the money. And that’s, I guess that makes them feel more confident in their decision in moving forward with me.
Alina Warrick (44m 27s):
What does that Hedge Fund company in Australia called?
Christian Carreon (44m 31s):
It is called, I don’t know the exact name because it was through a, it was a subsidiary of the hedge fund and the subsidiary was called The Chartist.
Alina Warrick (44m 41s):
The Chartist?
Christian Carreon (44m 42s):
Yeah. So like, stock chart and Chartist like artist.
Alina Warrick (44m 46s):
Got it. Do they still run that mentorship program?
Christian Carreon (44m 51s):
They do.
Alina Warrick (44m 51s):
Okay. Got it. Got it.
Christian Carreon (44m 53s):
But that’s pretty much how I pivoted from that struggle.
Alina Warrick (44m 56s):
Yeah. So you found like a, maybe a small weakness that your clients were struggling with to see that a young person like yourself, although you have a bachelor’s degree in finance, they were kind of iffy of managing thousands and thousands of dollars in retirement. So you pivoted and you went and got yourself more education, which is, has tremendously helped you throughout your.
Christian Carreon (45m 21s):
Oh yeah. I mean, it’s changed. I want to say it’s changed my life.
Alina Warrick (45m 25s):
Awesome. Awesome. Wow. That’s amazing. So let’s switch gears and talk a little bit about successes. Are there any successes that you would like to outline from your Immigrant Entrepreneur journey?
Christian Carreon (45m 36s):
I think learning how to pivot, learning how my mom pivoted through those difficult years, learning how to pivot myself through, as you know, I went through life. I think that’s a really big success because you either take advantage of the possible opportunity that you are faced with then you pivot or you don’t, and you continue to work hard towards whatever you are working at, either that it works out for you or it doesn’t. And I think for somebody, with my background, understanding that I was faced, I was given very little opportunities. I had to pivot into what could help me in the future.
Christian Carreon (46m 15s):
Looking at, I saw it as my health, having a deadline, and I had this mentality of, okay, I need to pivot if something’s not working and just continue to do so. And so a little by little everything started happening for me. And I think I see that as a success.
Alina Warrick (46m 34s):
So what’s next for you Christian? What are some business goals for the next couple of years? Anything that you can share with us?
Christian Carreon (46m 39s):
Yeah, so I recently started a mentorship group , I mentor traders from, it was pretty beautiful around the world and I helped them and guide them and teaching them how to create their own systematic trading system. Okay. So managing the models, my goal is to continue doing that, to help sort of give back to these group of traders that have the center to work with me either through one-on-one mentoring or to group mentoring. And my goals are to have a hedge fund. I’ve created strategies that have done really well, especially in one of the worst fears of the stock market. And my future is to have a hedge fund and to open up a non-profit so I can help people create the lives they want to just like I had.
Alina Warrick (47m 28s):
Wow, amazing. I know you’re going to surpass all those goals, Christian.
Christian Carreon (47m 33s):
Thank you.
Alina Warrick (47m 34s):
As an immigrant coming here, going through all those struggles, what does the American dream mean to you?
Christian Carreon (47m 42s):
Gosh. That’s a powerful question.
Alina Warrick (47m 46s):
Take your time.
Christian Carreon (47m 48s):
I think it means finding the freedom to, that’s a really tough question. What’s a good. Yeah. It means so much. How do I put it into words? I mean, I think it’s being able to go out and create the life that you want. I think America is such a beautiful place to do that. And I think that regardless of your background, regardless of your situation, regardless of what you look like, I think you can come here and literally within a short, now especially the way technology is moving, within a short period of time you can make a tremendous quantum leap and really create any type of life that you want.
Christian Carreon (48m 32s):
And I think that is a freedom that Americans have and not a lot of people around the world have, especially in very third world countries. And I think helping us each other, you know, realize that, that you can come, regardless of how you feel that you were to stand out because of your background or what you look like. I want to say that I faced a lot of racism and I faced a lot of judgment, but ultimately that was an internal belief and it was not reality because if it was reality, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish the things I did. And so I think that is what the American dream is to really give you, devote your focus, your time and your life, you know, a chapter of your life into really doing the work necessary.
Christian Carreon (49m 16s):
I think the world is yours and that’s possible here. And we’ve seen that back to back by many different people, in many different, beautiful companies that they’ve created.
Alina Warrick (49m 27s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, look at you, you were thrown in jail, you went through all sorts of racism through the law enforcement when your parents went through bankruptcies. I mean, you live the life of being down in the bottom to be creating this wealth management. And that is not easy at all. That, there’s so much responsibility in that. So, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Christian Carreon (49m 55s):
Of course.
Alina Warrick (49m 56s):
So what are some things that you would advise the next aspiring immigrant that wants to start their own business listening to you right now?
Christian Carreon (50m 5s):
I would say, commit and do it. I mean, if you’re in a position in life where you don’t have a lot of responsibilities, I just go back to the time that if you can take the risk, do it. So going back to the conversation on what I said about employee versus having your own business, I mean, because especially now as to what happened last year, considering that risk and what that risk can mean for your future, there’s going to be life events that happen and those life events can end up crippling yourself, your family. So you drew, you right now, have a good time span of two to five years where you have no big responsibilities as far as, you know, home ownership, family, children, or you do, but that’s a very small responsibility.
Christian Carreon (50m 49s):
I think we should be encouraged to be taking that risk, especially in your 20’s. You know, if these are young immigrants who are still coming here, I mean, just risk at all. If I were to lose everything, I would start all over again by risking it all. I just feel like there is so much opportunity here for you to not take any risk at all. And with the way the world is moving. I mean, you know, with the remote office work, with the growth in consultants versus employees, right. If we can sort of imagine what that trajectory would be, we can sort of say, okay, well, this is the future that, you know, the States is moving towards.
Christian Carreon (51m 32s):
And so what can I do now? How can I risk a lot of my time and just create something of myself through the knowledge that when it acquires or how they apply themselves in a job in order to make that quantum leap in their life.
Alina Warrick (51m 49s):
So amazing. So amazing. And forget about that broken English accent. You can still make it big in America right.
Christian Carreon (51m 56s):
Absolutely.
Alina Warrick (51m 58s):
Yeah. Awesome. So to wrap it up, I have some super fast questions for you, if you’re okay with that.
Christian Carreon (52m 4s):
Yes.
Alina Warrick (52m 5s):
Okay, what time do you normally start your day?
Christian Carreon (52m 8s):
5:30.
Alina Warrick (52m 9s):
Wow. Awesome. And how many employees do you have?
Christian Carreon (52m 13s):
None.
Alina Warrick (52m 13s):
It’s just you and your partner?
Christian Carreon (52m 15s):
It is.
Alina Warrick (52m 16s):
Wow. Awesome. So do you guys have an office or this is all just remote.
Christian Carreon (52m 21s):
We do. Currently we’re working from home.
Alina Warrick (52m 24s):
Okay.
Christian Carreon (52m 25s):
But you know, our office is in West Hollywood.
Alina Warrick (52m 27s):
Oh, got it. And so there’s no employees, it’s just you and your partner running the show?
Christian Carreon (52m 32s):
Yeah. Pretty much we’ve been able to become efficient by how we manage things and it’s worked out well.
Alina Warrick (52m 39s):
That’s great. That’s great. Zero overhead costs.
Christian Carreon (52m 43s):
Pretty much.
Alina Warrick (52m 45s):
All right. How often do you watch TV in a week?
Christian Carreon (52m 48s):
In a week. Gosh, very little, you know, I have this, a lot of people consider it a joke, but I don’t. I’ve never bought a TV for my self since I’ve been here. So I don’t, I am against TV. I like to read. And I think, we should be educating ourselves more than watching TV. So I would say maybe two hours a week, maybe.
Alina Warrick (53m 9s):
Okay. So you do have a TV now?
Christian Carreon (53m 12s):
I do. It was a gift because I didn’t want to buy one.
Alina Warrick (53m 17s):
It’s funny because we grow up without having a TV. So when were in school? In like grade school? All my friends were like, Hey, did you see this show? And I’m like, no. And I was always the weird one because I had no idea why everyone was talking about all of these shows and I can totally relate to you. That’s awesome. Don’t ever turn on that TV.
Christian Carreon (53m 39s):
Not if you haven’t created a life that you wanted.
Alina Warrick (53m 42s):
Right. Right. And the last one is, how many hours of work do you normally put it in on average in a week?
Christian Carreon (53m 49s):
Oh my gosh, way too many. I started the mentorship last quarter. And so that took up a lot of my time, creating an algorithm is not an easy task. So I would find myself working after hours a lot. But you know, one of my goals this year is to pour love into the aspects of my life that I had been neglecting. So at the time I want to take some time away from working too much.
Alina Warrick (54m 18s):
Yeah. And so on average, what do you think it would be?
Christian Carreon (54m 22s):
60.
Alina Warrick (54m 23s):
Oh, that’s not bad at all.
Christian Carreon (54m 25s):
Really?
Alina Warrick (54m 26s):
No, I have people on this show, 70 to 80 and you know, they just work, work, work. Six days is not bad at all. Don’t panic, don’t freak out. There was one girl on this show, she works like 120 hours a week.
Christian Carreon (54m 43s):
Really.
Alina Warrick (54m 43s):
You know, I do want to quote, one more thing is from the book you mentioned is, work like hell the first few years, so you can have the life you want later. I think that’s so powerful. To be focused on building that dream job or building that dream company and work like crazy. And who cares what people say, because later on you are going to have the last laugh, so.
Christian Carreon (55m 11s):
Absolutely.
Alina Warrick (55m 11s):
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Hey, thank you so much, Christian. I totally appreciate your time and coming onto the show and what an amazing journey that you have gone through, through all the struggles and especially being in jail. I mean, that was probably such an eye-opening experience to you. And now you’re rocking the world and you’re building such an amazing company, and I wish you all the best of successes.
Christian Carreon (55m 36s):
Thank you, Alina. Thank you for inviting me and having me on.
Alina Warrick (55m 39s):
All righty, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. If there are any links that were mentioned in this episode, make sure to check them out on my website under this episode to find all the links conveniently located in the show notes. I just wanted to ask for a quick favor, if you could please leave a review wherever you’re at listening to this podcast. Also, if you’re an immigrant entrepreneur and would love to be on my podcast, please email me and we’ll get connected. I’ll see you guys all next time for another exciting and impactful episode, take care.
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